Bea and Proust
A few evenings ago I went out and left Rupert in charge of the children. The next morning when I got up I found Bea on the sofa reading Proust. In French.
“What’s going on?” I asked him. He told me he had read them the beginning of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a bedtime story the night before. He got out of bed (unusual before his cup of tea) to come and look at Bea.
“Are you enjoying the book?” he asked her.
“I am,” she replied. “But it’s not like a book, more like poetry.”
I think we have a literary critic in the making. And now I can bore people at dinner parties for years to come by boasting “well, of course Bea was reading Proust when she was eight, in the original French, bien sur.”
As for baby Bea, she has read six pages (more than I have ever read) and is still very fond of it. I hope she experiences a similar love affair to the one I had with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Famous Five at her age.
Her new hero Proust describes it very well: “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”
Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2009
11 Sep 2009 helena
Good God! It looks like you’re breeding a team of surdoués.
There is a French joke about (grown up) people who pretend to be re-reading A la recherche du temps perdu. Meaning they never actually read it in the first place, but it’s kind of posh to say that they are giving the book another shot. pffft!
I’m still in love with The famous five;) x
a credit to you both.
When Bea reaches her 10th birthday give her the book “Marianne’s Dreams” by Catherine Storr. I adored it and it haunted me (in a good way) all my life. Then when I cleared out my Mum’s house I found it and read it again and it was still wonderful (and I was rather chuffed at the standard of books I was reading back then).
Bea has also read more that I ever have.
Aren’t you very proud of her?
She looks very like you in the photo too- especially the shape of her mouth.